


Protect Me under the Shadow of Thy Wings

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Canon Jewish Character, Catholic Character, Gen, Jewish Character, Religion, religious identity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-30
Updated: 2015-04-30
Packaged: 2018-03-26 10:42:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3847924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It may be that vampires are accursed of God and cut off from the land of the living, but even so, Carmilla is less separated from the Catholicism of her childhood than she might seem. Perry, curious about Carmilla's affinity for Kierkegaard, touches on this, dredging up some of her and LaF's own issues of faith and culture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Protect Me under the Shadow of Thy Wings

**Author's Note:**

> Perry's opinions are heavily inspired by those of the Israeli biochemist and theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994), who is named directly in the text of the fic.
> 
> Mädchen in Uniform is a German film, made in 1931 by a heavily Jewish cast and crew, with overt lesbian themes; Altneuland is a 1902 utopian novel by the early Zionist leader Theodor Herzl.
> 
> The church in Québec City is real; it is called Presbytère Saint-Sacrement.
> 
> The reference to a 'Book of Common Prayer' marks Laura's family as (on paper) Anglican.
> 
> I'm told that Perry has been confirmed as canonically being from Europe so this might just have to be an AU where she's not.

It’s become so vastly different that she doesn’t even know if she was remembering it right in the first place.

German, instead of Latin. Facing the flock, instead of facing the altar. Far less interest in the elevation of the Host, far more interest in its actual distribution and consumption. She hangs back, hangs around, in the shadows at the back of the nave, watching impassively. There’s an attraction to it, and a revulsion. How can there not be?

She’s come at slightly different times each Sunday for the past few weeks, seen slightly different parts of the service taking place before her. She’s never gone up, of course—to much of the blood of men in her mouth to even think of taking the blood of God. That would just be gluttony, at this point. And besides, her heart and soul and body had fallen away altogether, hadn’t they? So how could she…?

She watches every intricate choreographed moment of the sacrament and as much as she would like to say that she feels nothing she is the only person she has never been able to lie to. (Not having the _wherewithal_ to lie is another matter; there are two of those people, other than herself.) The parishioners, mostly aging or already old, start to file out and she sees somebody she recognizes from longer back than she prefers to think, from the middle of that lacuna in her preferred memories, the period from Ell to Laura where all that’s worthwhile is what kindnesses Mother had, she must admit, shown her. In 1954 he had already been approaching middle age.

She congratulates him on his longevity without letting him see her face, then flees from the church before the postlude begins, the sound of it screeching in her ears as she passes through the village.

*

It’s the morning of the first day of her first Passover away from home, and she’s wondering if they even have matzo here. It’s an international university, they actually get a lot of Canadians and Americans and even have a Canadian or American structure to some of the extracurriculars, but it’s in a country with only about ten thousand Jews out of a population of eight and a half million. She knows; she’s checked. Admittedly, in terms of percentage, that’s about the same as Canada, but the low overall number still rankles a little, makes her feel a little alone, even though she knows that logically it should not. (The trepidation could also have nothing to do with demographics and simply be a product of the fact that this was a country that had, by many accounts, flunked its denazification process.)

The cafeteria has matzo ball soup and she chows down, though not without noticing that there’s a weird salty-iron taste to the broth that might be enough to make it treyf, which for _matzo ball soup_ is _perverse._ She doesn’t have a clue what to do about that. The rest of her day doesn’t go well.

She says the right prayers and gets into her bed across the room from Susan’s and falls asleep staring at the ceiling. She gets nothing from it emotionally; she’s learned not to expect any rewards for keeping the commandments in this world, and she isn’t sure she expects any in the world-to-come either. Some people would say that that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and she almost believes that.

The next day, she starts going by her last name. She’ll be damned if there won’t be some sort of connection to her family and her history that she maintains in this place. Susan looks at her a little funny, and she is aware that she is a hypocrite and a coward. But at least G—d may one day forgive those things; He may be more forgiving and merciful than humans are.

*

They used to go on long walks from Saint-Sacrement all the way down to Vieux-Québec, passing, of course, the Assemblée nationale on the way. Every weekend day they’d go down. Their accent when they spoke English had mostly disappeared by that point, as had their best friend’s accent when she spoke French. Of course there were churches on the way; sometimes she even went in.

Lola understood herself as a lesbian, they knew, and she was very serious about it, and it was some sort of combination of _Mädchen in Uniform_ and _Altneuland_ that had induced her to want to study German—to want to go to school in a German-speaking country, no less, even if the language of instruction was English for historical reasons that neither of them really understood. She’d been very excited when she’d found a citation of a Yeshayahu Leibowitz quote to the effect that, homosexual conduct being what it was, even so, gay people should do their best to remain observant Jews in other ways. She didn’t seem to understand that that didn’t help _them_ in these churches that they passed, and that, besides, they weren’t ‘gay’ either. (But converting away wasn’t an option—how could it be?—there were questions of Nationhood to consider.)

Now that has all come out and is all on the table and Lola—Perry—still isn’t dealing with it well. Laura pointed out once that Perry, going by ‘Perry’ as she did, was being hypocritical about it, but all that that had accomplished was that Laura and Perry hadn’t spoken for a week.

Walking across campus they run into Carmilla. Where she’s coming from, they don’t know, but if they didn’t know better they could swear that she’s crossing herself.

*

‘There was probably some Jewish ancestry, yes…the Jews were never _entirely_ expelled from Austria, except for once for a few years in I think the fifteenth century, but there was persecution, and of course even later on there was still pressure to convert…Gustav Mahler most famously. –Yes, we had probably converted well before we were ennobled. We didn’t—I don’t really know.’

‘Anyway, what’s done is done. Besides, who would you say your mother even _is?’_

She looks up. Perry is sitting there with a guilty expression as if just having realized that that question is in spectacularly bad taste. It’s uncharacteristic of her. Perry has many flaws—she’s temperamental, wilfully ignorant about a variety of things, and completely incapable of admitting the double standards that she applies to herself and LaFontaine—but tactlessness isn’t usually one of them.

‘Is this conversation making you uncomfortable, Easy-Bake?’

‘No…no, it’s just…well, yes. A little.’

Carmilla looks at her from across the room and it feels a little judgmental, but she has to admit at long last that she has no reason to complain about that, and no room to. The copy of _Either/Or_ on the floor between them is half-covered with a bra that Carmilla changed out of without taking her top off and without waiting for Perry to turn around. (Laura had been there too, hadn’t accompanied Susan to the cafeteria for an early dinner yet, but then, there was no reason why Laura would have wanted to look away.)

‘We can stop discussing this any time. You’re the one who brought it up.’

‘Only because I finally noticed that it’s Kierkegaard you’re always reading.’

Carmilla sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘Look. I don’t _care_ if Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the Binding of Isaac ‘goes against the Oral Torah’ or whatever. Kierkegaard the Lutheran parted company from Jewish tradition! _Shocking.’_

She doesn’t really want to ask Carmilla the question that’s on her mind now.

*

She sits with LaFontaine in the cafeteria eating a relatively normal meal. LaFontaine is telling her about this church in Québec City that contains either the mummy or a waxwork of Saint Pierre-Julien Eymard, LaFontaine isn’t making it quite clear which. They’re telling her about it in a way that entirely focuses on how subjectively ‘cool’ this thing is and doesn’t really seem to address the fact that it’s a church in any way. A lot of the stories that LaFontaine tells her about churches in Québec City, about Québec City in general really, seem to have this in common.

‘I still have my mother’s Book of Common Prayer,’ she says, ‘in my room at home.’

‘Oh?’ LaFontaine doesn’t seem sure why he’s bringing this up and she’s not sure she knows either.

‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Dad says she converted to marry him. I don’t really know why; after she died he never really bothered to tell me these things.’

‘I haven’t been to church in…months,’ says LaFontaine. They seem more concerned about this than she would have expected.

‘I haven’t been in a decade,’ she replies.

*

‘What is it that appeals to you, if it isn’t tradition?’

 _‘Ugh._ I wish I hadn’t let you _drag_ me into explaining this. It’s…nothing _appeals_ to me. Kierkegaard is just less obnoxious than the others.’

She purses her lips and raise her eyebrows. Carmilla has her booted feet on the bed again.

Carmilla groans. ‘I stopped believing in G—d,’ she drawls, ‘sometime…sometime around the coffin, maybe? Or earlier, even—at some point around then. But then, a lot of the world stopped believing in G—d around then.’

‘Did you stop believing _because_ of the coffin, or what happened with Ell?’ she asks.

Carmilla has probably said this many times before, probably says it to fish for sympathy or banal understanding or to be felt sorry for without having to actively admit that she is weak. But that is not what she’s going to get out of her.

‘Yes,’ Carmilla says, not looking at her.

She stands up, and goes to the door. ‘Then you never believed in G—d,’ she says, and slams it behind her.

*

She finds LaFontaine trudging from one class to another around where the Lustig used to be.

‘Hey.’

‘Oh, hey, Carmilla. What’s up?’

No more introduction needed as far as she’s concerned. ‘You’re Catholic, right?’ she says.

‘I’m French-Canadian,’ they say as if that is an answer in and of itself. Until recent years in Quebec it may have been. ‘Why do you ask? I wouldn’t have expected you to care about…’

The words come out staccato and almost involuntarily.

‘I just told your girlfriend that I don’t believe in God, but…that isn’t actually true.’

‘Dude, Perr’s not my—’

‘That’s _not the point.’_ Her hand goes to their shoulder. She feels herself stooping, her head drooping. ‘I just need to talk about this with somebody.’

‘Why don’t you talk to Laura? We were just in the caf, she was telling me about this prayer book of her mom’s actually, and—’

‘Laura can’t help.’ She’s surprised to hear how belabored her voice sounds, how heavy and heady her breathing is. ‘Laura’s barely even a _Protestant.’_ The word comes out like a curse. ‘The giant one’s no use, she’s probably off sacrificing small woodland creatures to Diana or something…not that I would _ever_ talk to _her_ about this anyway…’

They say ‘Don’t let what you believe suffer because of something dumb like what you are,’ and she really has to wonder what this means coming from _LaFontaine_ of all people.

‘I try not to,’ she says.

‘Talk to Laura about it,’ they say. ‘She’ll understand. Promise. That’s a LaFontaine Guarantee.’

She swallows hard. ‘I’ll believe that,’ she says. ‘But…I really would like to talk about with you more first…a little…if we can.’

‘Okay,’ they say, and it’s almost like returning.


End file.
